Pour la liberté de Monde...souscrivez à l'Emprunt National à la Banque National Crédit (For the freedom of the world...Subscribe to the National Loan at the National Credit Bank), SEM; Devambez Printers

Exhibition Label: “Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts,” Mar-2010, Steve Goddard Goursat began contributing illustrations of everyday life and fashion to Parisian journals in 1898; his work quickly became synonymous with the Belle Époque (Beautiful Era) of European life prior to the War. After war broke out in 1914, he became a war correspondent, visiting the trenches at Verdun and the Somme and sending articles and sketches back to the French press. He also designed posters for the war effort, the most iconic of which is his Pour la liberté de Monde. This poster was created to promote subscription bonds from the Banque Nationale de Crédit, and shows a half-submerged silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. During World War I, anthropomorphized figures of Liberty were conflated into allegories of the Motherland and national rebirth in the poster campaigns for the war loans.